President Donald Trump on Tuesday spurned four-term Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and endorsed his primary challenger, Ken Paxton, the firebrand state attorney general who’s been indicted and impeached and has positioned himself as a Trump-inspired disruptor.
“Ken Paxton has gone through a lot, in many cases, very unfairly, but he is a Fighter, and knows how to WIN,’’ Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.
Trump’s announcement came one week before the runoff election in the Republican primary to decide who will take on Democratic nominee James Talarico. Cornyn finished ahead of Paxton in the March primary — barely — but failed to clear the 50 percent threshold to avoid the runoff.
Cornyn and national Republicans had long pushed for an endorsement from Trump, whose seal of approval remains a powerful symbol to GOP primary voters despite his declining polling numbers. Paxton earlier this year met with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort and even offered to step aside if the Senate nixed the legislative filibuster to pass a bill known as the Save America Act, a GOP-crafted package of voter ID requirements and other elections changes, which is currently stalled.
In his endorsement post, Trump praised Paxton as “a Strong Supporter of TERMINATING THE FILIBUSTER and, very importantly, THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.”
